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Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Some ideas and questions on how to look at the User Survey data

Hi folks,

first things first!

Happy New Year!

Now, since the Renaissance wiki is down, I thought sharing some of our data analysis ideas over the blog might be an alternative. As you might know, we have collected a huge pile of data with the user survey. Now is the time to take a closer look at the numbers and the survey content as such. Some of you already did that as revealed by the discussion that is going on on the mailing lists. Thanks for that! However, here are some questions/hints/aspects you could pose/keep in mind when looking, analyzing and drawing conclusions from the collected data.

1 Who are our users as revealed by the survey?1.1 Do the users represent people we have/had in mind?1.2 Are these the users we actually design and develop for?

2 What value these users most in OOo?2.1 Is that something we have expected?2.2 Is that something we were hoping for?2.3 Is that something we actively worked for?

3 For what purposes is OOo used?3.1 Is that something that we anticipated?3.2 Is that something we have worked for?3.3 Is that something OOo is really made for?3.4 To what extent does that usage cover the functionality of OOo?

4 What makes OOo so popular among these users?4.1 Is that a quality we have expected?4.2 Is that a quality we worked/work for?4.3 Is that a measurable quality?

5 How does the distribution of the users look like?5.1 Do we have some peaks e.g. in age, usage, language etc.?

6 To which questions did we hope to collect answers by this survey?6.1 Did we get the data we were looking for?6.2 Can we get the answers to all our questions from the data?6.3 Did this survey meet our own quality criteria in terms of objectivity, reliability and validity?

I hope that this will help us a bit to direct our discussions from a descriptive to a more inferential analysis of the data. Finally, we would like to draw conclusions from these results that are valid and valuable for generating design ideas in a later phase.